West African powers in the Caribbean have often been studied as important cultural and religious formations. This article treats them as ontological formations by collapsing the modern opposition between reason/knowledge and power/force. The distinction between the "knowing" West anchored in a unified scientific reason and the "believing" Rest who trust in many cultures is therefore refused. With the above prerequisite in mind, a new approach to creolization, termed "tukontology," is deployed to reveal a Kuhnian type paradigm shift in the war-medicine of blacks on British West Indian plantations between 1645 and emancipation in 1838.
